Small Town Luxury
by MissGuenever
Summary: Shelley visits Eliot at his country hideaway. A cross-over between my stories Luxuries & Lost and Cities. Beer, women, and good food!


**A/N**: **tvj12** thanks for the inspiration on this one! And as always a HUGE thank you to **Gaben** for being my ever patient Beta. This is a cross-over fic between my Luxuries and Loss series of ficlets, and my Cities series. You don't really need to have read Cities; but, reading Luxuries and Loss might be a good thing. Enjoy!

His house in New Hampshire was in a small town. A very small town. It was kind of like the town he'd grown up in, just a lot older. The town Eliot had grown up was founded somewhere around the time of the Civil War, this town on the other hand had been founded before the Revolutionary War! Or the War of Independence as Sophie called it.

In fact Joe his sparring partner, who had a small dojo downtown was from a family that could, and did, trace their roots back almost three hundred years to soldiers that had responded to the Provincial Congress' call in April of 1775. And Joe was Sonny's second cousin twice removed on his mother's side. Most of the people in town could trace their lineage like that.

The only reason that Eliot was accepted around town was because Joe said that he was alright, and was kind of an adopted cousin. So when the hitter was in town he drove Mrs. Smith around if she needed or want to go somewhere. She lived on the other side of Sonny and Adele, and really didn't like driving much because people just went so fast! Mrs Smith had been a nurse way back when, and her eyesight had gone. Unfortunately her sons lived on the other side of Boston and couldn't get up here to take her to the Doctors and the grocery store, and sometimes even church.

Taking Mrs. Smith around wasn't too bad; especially since her bridge club made really good pie! And every couple of weeks there would be a new pie on his doorstep. This week it had been lemon. Although there was a downside to taking her places too, every time one of the church ladies discovered a single woman under the age of fifty they tried to hook him up. Every single time! Eliot was about ready to claim he was gay and that Hardison was his boyfriend! Although maybe Shelley would be a better choice; at least he didn't feel the need to talk all the frigging time.

Eliot looked around his kitchen, and smiled at the project he'd just finished: The bookcase Elambert had found him in town. Now that it was finished it glowed. The grain of the American Chestnut was absolutely beautiful! This house was an amazing place; it was a place where he could just be… Just be Eliot Spencer. It was the only place he could just be himself and not worry.

The way Eliot described this town, his neighbors, and his house had made Shelley pooh-pooh it claiming "That's the town time forgot, I ain't going up there." But, then he'd driven up on Saturday for a card game, dinner with Joe and the crew, and to help Eliot with taking down a couple of trees that had lown down in the last storm. And well, between Adele making Sonny walk over to check up on him because she'd seen a strange truck in the driveway, and then Mrs. Smith had walked over, and brought lemon meringue pie, because Adele had called and said that Eliot was having some of his little friends over. Plus, Joe had said something to Joseph, who was often called _Young Joe_, had called over to his cousin; Dale who'd been a SeaBee, and Dale's daughter had dropped off a rice casserole. While he'd been chopping vegetables for dinner Eliot felt the need to point out to Shelley: It had been Dale's single daughter, Sarah that had dropped the casserole off.

Shelley had been upstairs taking a shower when Sarah had come by; and t hearing that Sarah had dropped off a rice casserole, Shelley's eyes had lit up; he loved that 'ricey' thing Eliot made. After Sarah, the overly made up twenty-something had left Eliot, stared at the foil covered dish and grimaced.

"Hey man, what's wrong?"

"I've eaten at their house a couple of times, Sarah and her mother have never made anything that didn't involve boxes or cans."

"So." Shelley shrugged, he hadn't really either unless you counted MRE's they were in pouches.

"If this is her fancy casserole it means she bought the name brands instead of the generic."

Again Shelley shrugged. "Sounds good."

Eliot shuddered and growled at his friend "The amount of crap in that…"

"And?"

"Artificial food coloring, preservatives, sodium … There is a reason that people last longer in the ground, even when they aren't embalmed."

At the quizzical look Shelley was giving him the hitter explained "Preservatives, all the crap they stick in processed food; we take extra decades to decompose!"

"Huh so I'll live longer." God it was fun egging Eliot on! Shelley thought as he smirked and munched on a stolen piece of celery.

Eliot glared at his longtime friend and went back to chopping the vegetables he had stacked in neat little piles .

"So this is pretty much like that rice thing you made when we were in Lebanon?"

Smacking Shelley's hand away from the carrots he was mincing, Eliot gave Shelley a death stare. "No, that abomination is nothing like riz bi sh'arieh! Rice-A-Roni has everything from autolyzed yeast extract to hydrolyzed corn gluten in it! Have you ever looked at the ingredients? Riz bi sh'arieh is just rice, noodles, shortening, and water."

Having successfully grabbed a piece of carrot from Eliot he smirked "Sounds kind of plain." At the retrieval specialist waving his chef's knife around his nose, Shelley kept on talking. "Just saying. Rice-A-Roni has garlic and and…" He was at a loss for words. "Uhh... Green stuff in it."

"Green stuff? Green stuff?" Eliot shook his fist at Shelley and then dumped the carrots into the pot to sweat a little.

"Yeah, you've got it in the pot outside." Shelley waved a celery stick in the vague direction of the front porch. "Whatever that stuff is called."

"Parsley, you mean parsley?"

"Yeah, the green stuff." He grinned and took a drink from his bottle of beer. It was so much fun riling him up!

At the fierce scowl he was getting from the hitter, Shelley took his beer bottle and waggled it at his best friend. "You are so easy."

They both broke out in big smiles and clanked their beer bottles.

After swallowing the ice cold beer Shelley asked "So… About Sarah?"

**E/N**: So this is pretty close to the recipe my father used to make. Pretty close, it's from a cook book I've got. The source is below if you want the rest of the recipes.

Rice with Noodles

RIZ BI SH'ARIEH

2 cups rice

1/2 cup fine noodles

3/4 cup samneh (or other shortening)

1 1/2 tsp. salt

2 1/2 cups water

Soak local rice in hot water for half an hour. Wash and drain. Heat samneh until it smokes and fry noodles in this hot fat for two minutes. Watch carefully so that they do not burn. Add rice and salt. Stir to coat rice evenly with fat. Add water. Boil on high flame until water is nearly all absorbed. Lower the flame, place a wire rack between the flame and the pan and leave it covered until rice is dry and fluffy. Stir very gently when ready to serve. Accompany with a dish of laban.

(From Food from the Arab World Marie Karam Khayat and Margaret Clark Keatinge, Khayat's, Beirut 1959)


End file.
